Poor Grant

[degringolade]

 

I can’t really say that my writing has been going well of late.  I figure it is a hobby, not a meaningful activity to anyone (save myself) and so I can shelve it when I need to and pick it up again later.  No harm, no foul.

I suppose that I am an anti-monk.  The monks of the past usually earned their daily bread by copying what someone in the deep dark past had written down.  I earn my daily bread (just kidding) by writing something new that I am chewing on at the moment.  

Lately I have been “de-boning” Graham Hancock.  I am intrigued by the guy for three reasons:  1) he writes pretty well, 2) he has some interesting ideas, and 3) he has a legitimate bone to pick with the way that academia operates.  

Now, the opposite side of this coin is that in a real sense he violates Occam’s razor pretty badly.  He has his theory and he is willing and able to jet around the planet, fucking up the environment, to dig out things that might support his theory if people would just look at the little tidbits he digs up the way that he wants them looked at.  

But overall, why I don’t find him particularly convincing is that he intimates that “science” is corrupt (which it most certainly is) and how the pooh-bah mavens of the archeology/anthropology/paleoclimatogy won’t give him a break and how they keep resisting his self-centered and half baked theories.

Now, this is going to piss a lot of people off, but, in my opinion the academics resembles his way of thinking to a great degree.  And to me he seems as though he is just complaining that he isn’t invited to hang out in the sanctum sanctorum.

Perhaps Monty Python explains this better.

https://youtu.be/QfArEGCm7yM

Look, I think the main problem is that archeology, paleontology, and their ilk just really aren’t “science”.  They are a clubby little group that bestow degrees upon true believers and drive apostates from the temple.

Grant is a non-believer.  He might even be considered a heretic in the sense that when he finds someone who supports his hypotheses, if that person has credentials, he trumpets that fact to the moon.  He claims not toe be a scientist, but he attempts to cherry pick factoids from anyone, anywhere to support a theory that has no chance of actually every having systematic proof with valid internal, external, positive, and negative controls.

All that being said, I am still intrigued by his hypothesis.  I even like and give credence to the data and speculations that he has cherry picked to support the data.

But at the end of the day, Grant is just trying to become a member of the science club.  He ought to be careful of what he is asking for when he attempts to convince people of the veracity of his hypotheses.  The nasty back closets of science are currently being pried open and the light upon the nature of that particular religion is being exposed.